Baccano!

For something a little bit different and fun…I had bought the Baccano! series at Otakon. I enjoy mecha, I still like FMA, even though I still feel the reboot is a tad weak, and nobody can ever wean me off of Patlabor. So, I hearkened back to a previous Otakon and remembered how much I liked Baccano!.

As I have said before,you can ID a pretty good anime when you are at a convention and once the 4 episodes are over, people are wanting more. Baccano! fits into this category. I caught it at Otakon 2009 and saw episodes that are, I believe on the second DVD of the collection.

Baccano! jumps back and forth through in time. It spends a little bit of time in 1711, to show how this small group of people became immortal. But it also bounces around a lot in the 1930’s…in Chicago and aboard a train. The premise (but not the actual beginning of the anime) is that there were a group of travelers aboard a ship, presumably going to the American colonies. These people were conjurers and “alchemists” who, I think were driven away. On the ship, people started dying in a rather horrible fashion, so they did what came naturally to them: conjure up a demon.

The demon gave them an elixir that bestowed immortality upon them. The trick was that they had to use their own names through time, could transfer knowledge by placing a hand on someone’s forehead or kill them by doing the same act and sucking them into themselves. The group decided that only one of them would retain knowledge on how to make the elixir and not to make anymore immortals. One evil gentleman disagreed and started to, of course, sucking people in. He would later be thrown off the ship.

Fast forward to the 1930’s Chicago. The group has gone through time relatively unscathed until the evil Szilard (just sounds evil, doesn’t it?) is finally able to make the elixir on his own…only to have it stolen by accident…setting off a chain of events that involve the Mafia, immortals, a vicious serial killer, a sociopath and his suicidal wife, the FBI and a clandestine intelligence agency (can’t say more on that, it would spoil things) over a number of years between Chicago, a train and New York.

I can’t say anymore than this is really pretty good, but very violent…and kind of twisted in some places. But I can tell you, that a subplot to the whole story revolves around a bumbling Bonnie and Clyde pair of thieves…who are just over the top and hilarious…and gives a new bent on cosplaying!

SIDE NOTES:

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Also, I am doing a little short term project on YouTube called, SixtySecondsSteve. Very simple: I upload a video from the day before that lasts only 60 seconds, give or take a few. There will be one per day until 12/31/10. On New Year’s Day the final video will be uploaded. These vids could be entertaining, boring, informative, mind-numbing…and could be of anything! So click the link below every day to see a new video. I started on 9/10/10 so you need to catch up!

http://www.youtube.com/user/SixtySecondsSteve


TONIGHT’S PLAYLIST:

I actually had Sirius/XM on tonight. I need some new music anyway. Anyone have any suggestions?